Dave's Book Rant: 

     Transformers: Hardwired (Book 1)

     Finally got this just before leaving on a trip to surprise Mom for her
60th birthday, so I had plenty of time in airports to read it.  A note for
those trying to order it, Waldenbooks has it in their computers as "Book One"
instead of as Hardwired.  

CAPSULE

     Okay, it's a TF novel written for a non-kiddie audience, great.  But the
author has some serious problems with his style, and the book was not edited
at all (at best, it was spellchecked and word-counted).  Some good bits, but
a lot of disappointment.  Very mildly recommended.  $6.99/$10.50Cn/#5.99UK

RANT

     I'll start with the non-spoiler stuff, then ease into some commentary
about the details of the plot.

     First off, as others have noticed, this book has clearly not been edited
by a live human being with actual training as an editor.  Numerous homonym
errors are made (it's/its, teaming/teeming, raised/razed, the near-miss of
honed instead of homed used twice, etc), tense and case disagreement, missing
connectors, and so forth.  Not just the small handful of errors that are
bound to slip past an editor, I was wincing every few pages.  It was like
listening to a song where the performer hits a sour note every few measures.
Granted, most readers aren't as sensitive to correct usage as I am (in fact,
I suspect the target audience won't even notice any of the errors), but it's
sloppy work and indicates that people involved in this project Just Didn't
Care.
     Another of Ciencin's major style problems is that he tends to bring the
story to a screeching halt in order to describe military hardware every so
often, a common failing of SF authors, especially those who do military SF.
And it's the harshest example of his generally uneven exposition and
description, which tends to ramble a lot and focus too often on irrelevant
details, or describe the same things over and over.
     Finally, and here I drift into spoiler territory, Ciencin is one of
those writers who equates serious writing with slaughterfests.  Not only are
numerous Transformers killed off (often with the ease of the slaughter in
Transformers: the Movie), but humans are killed in many ways, often gory and
fairly graphic.  Yes, there are consequences to war, collateral damage that
was deliberately avoided in the original cartoon.  But Ciencin lingers over
eviscerations and manglings as if an extracted spine was High Art.  It
strikes me as overcompensation, the writer trying to expunge the lingering
taint of kidvid by burying it in viscera.
     Ciencin's other credits are all licensed properties (Gen13, Star Wars,
Angel), but I was fully prepared to cut him slack anyway, given that one of
my favorite novelists (Peter David) runs heavily to licensed stuff himself.
Well, Scott Ciencin is no Peter David.  I won't go so far as to call him a
hack, I'll reserve judgement on that until I finish the trilogy and see how
he handles the plot he's set up here.  But there's a distinct aroma of
"jobbing it" here.

     Okay, now a quick plot summary for those who want such things.
Megatron, Prime, Jazz and Bluestreak, along with a bunch of humans, are
wormholed to an arena world (think Quintessons crossed with the Gamemasters
of Triskelion) while Prime is in the middle of an angstfest brought on by the
near-nuking of Los Angeles in the TFG1 vol 1 Dreamwave comic.  Starscream
steps into the power vacuum and decides to use humanity's greed and vanity to
create a power base in Las Vegas.  A rather clever plan, really, and
Starscream is portrayed pretty favorably here.  Not many Transformers appear
on either side (7 or so Autobots, the Constructicons, Reflector, Soundwave
and his tapes, 3 other 'Cons), and a several get killed (although I suspect
at least one will be resurrected all the way), making the "huge" battles feel
pretty small.  Meanwhile, Spike and a government cyborg run around following
hunches and stumbling across the Hidden Plot, eventually activating a Deus Ex
Machina and shifting the plot to Book 2.  Yeah, there's some resolution of
both the earthbound and space arena plots before they get Magic Wanded away,
but it's pretty blatant plotdevicing.  Oh, and along the way, a lot of
product placement happens, especially in the later battles where it's as if
Ciencin had a list of chain names he was told to include, and he just blew
them all up in a few pages.

     Overall, it reads like hackwork.  "Gimme 50,000 words of Transformers
stuff, here's Dreamwave's reference material, I need it by March."  It'd be a
real pity of Ciencin was actually trying to tell a good story here...because
while the story may end up being pretty good, the telling isn't.

     Dave Van Domelen, "The battle of the century was about to begin." -
Narration three pages before the end of the book.  The battle lasted a page.
Short slagging century, eh?